Enterprises have becoming geographically dispersed throughout the entire globe. Consequently, enterprises have developed a variety of data solutions for purposes of making enterprise data, automated services, and information available around the clock from any location and device having network access.
For some enterprises the directory of services and information can be voluminous, and the available services and information can often be accessed by multiple simultaneous users over the network. To address this performance issue, an enterprise may replicate services and information associated with one environment to another environment. In this manner, multiple environments are replicas of one another and can each simultaneously supply services and information to users over the network.
For example, a user may contact a particular directory service to locate a resource of the directory. That directory service is distributed and may be associated with a particular replica. In this manner, some users can be serviced off of different replicas or some users can be routed from one replica to another. This architecture permits an enterprise to more efficiently load balance and improve processing throughput of its directory and its associated services and information.
One problem that may arise is when a particular resource, such as resource R, is natively modified within one environment, such as environment X, and shortly after the modification, a user makes a request for R from within a different environment or replica, such as environment Y. If the change to R in X has not synchronized to Y at the time of the request, then the user will not get the correct version of R from Y or if R was originally non existent, then the user will receive an error message.
Another problem that may arise is with login attempts being made by a user. Typically, to ensure security a directory service will temporarily disable an id and password combination for a user if three consecutive incorrect id and password pairs are supplied to the directory service. If an intruder is aware of the various distributed replicas, then an intruder could contact multiple replicas of directory services at the same time to log into a user's account. This circumvents the security policy and permits an intruder to try more than an administrator-defined amount of times to guess an id and password combination.
Thus, it is advantageous to provide improved techniques for supplying distributed directory services.